The Rose Thieves

 

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A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

“In the Zoot Car” and “Nonchalant” (under the title “Chez

Sophie”) first appeared in
The Atlantic,

“Shoe” first appeared in
Grand Street,

“The Honored Guest” first appeared in
Yankee,

“Audrey: Keeper of the Flame” first appeared

in
The Boston Globe Magazine,
and

“Katie Vanderwald” first appeared in
The Agni Review.

 

The author wishes to acknowledge with gratitude the

Massachusetts Artists Foundation, the Ingram-Merrill

Foundation, the Fine Arts Work Center in Province-

town, the Copernicus Society (the Michener Award),

the Corporation of Yaddo, and the Connecticut

Commission on the Arts, whose support

made it possible to write this book.

 

For my mother, my father,

Laura Ann, Willi, Martha, and John

The Art of Conversation

“‘By-the-bye, what became of the baby?' said the Cat. ‘I'd nearly forgotten to ask.'

“‘It turned into a pig,' Alice answered very quietly, just as if the Cat had come back in a natural way.

“‘I thought it would,' said the Cat, and vanished again.”

My mother stopped reading, not that she had finished the chapter, but we heard my father's guests leaving by the back door. She watched from the bathroom window as they went up the hill to the driveway, two blocky, hunting-coated farmers who'd come from the valley to sell us a side of beef.

We almost never had visitors; we were new in town, and Ma didn't like anyone. The doctors and their wives were concerned mostly with football and antiques, the farmers were full of prejudice and superstition. The hedonism of the summer people (psychiatrists and editors up from New York) and the snobbery of our only real neighbors, an exiled White Russian couple who intended to raise pheasants on the land next to ours, were too repellent even to discuss—when their names came up, Ma just made a sour mouth. If a car pulled into the driveway, she'd run up the stairs, telling my father to say she had a headache, and read
Alice in Wonderland
to me. We'd been through three chapters that afternoon, with Ma marking intermissions by listening, at the stairwell, for my father's laugh. It was far too hearty. What had possessed him to let them stay so long? Now she went down, with me trailing like a dinghy in her wake, listening as her voice dropped to its iciest depth to question him, watching as she cleared the beer glasses from the table with enraged efficiency, as, running water in the sink, sponge in hand, she changed her mind and (inspired by the Dutchess' pot-hurling cook?) punctuated her volley of grievances by throwing the glasses, one by one, at his head.

She was not comfortable in the world, too large for it, perhaps, or too small. A trip to the grocer's was daunting as a safari for her, so chimerical were the local housewives and cashiers. At home, if my father was at work, she wouldn't answer the door at all. We had a wonderfully rich and various life all our own, she would have said, with our books, our garden, our imaginary games: we pictured ourselves Indians when we walked in the woods, settlers when we sat at the fire. If Ma was reading Jane Austen, she'd tell me about the Bennets and how I'd grow up to be just like them; when she read Proust, she promised we'd move to Paris, become demoiselles of the demimonde. We needed none of reality—Ma felt it was crushingly dull.

Old women, small children, the deathly ill, and members of various religious orders were exempt from the general censure. When the Congregational pastor called to say he and his wife usually welcomed Brimfield's new residents at this time of year (it was October, the lull before the holiday rush) and asked could they visit us some afternoon for tea, Ma answered emphatically,
“Yes.”

This, like every other slightly unusual occurrence in our lives, became a Great Event. They were coming on a Wednesday, so my father would be away and there was no one to damp our anticipation. We saw ourselves first as Puritans lifting the corn-cake from our stony hearth to serve the black-clad, eagle-faced Reverend, then (it seemed a shame to waste flour on something as dry as corncake, when we could have sponge cake filled with chestnut paste, raspberry jam, and whipped cream) as Parisians welcoming a soigné monseigneur. Ma sketched the scene for me: the charmingly erudite cleric, who by “tea” would mean “port,” really (we were skimming across the Channel toward a more Trollopian scheme), would make conversation with us, all flash and parry, laughter and wit, skewering his parish of rich women, detailing his travels in the Levant.

Fledgling socialites, we studied with ardor. Ma taught me to walk like a lady (silently; nothing must distract from my beauty) and to say (always to the lady first), “May I pour you out some tea?” “Isn't the weather fine?” I repeated after her, and (the words—I couldn't yet mimic her satirical tone) “Yes, I certainly agree.”

It began to seem as if our cavernous, beamed, and paneled living room would magically become, when the Reverend entered it, a gilt and satin parlor overlooking (what did it matter?) the Thames, or the Seine. So that the talk might do justice to the view, Ma lectured me on the art of conversation. “The sky tonight looks like…” she'd say, and I'd search for the perfect analogy, trying phrase after phrase until one seemed to strike the heart of the vision, showing not just how it looked but the way it made me feel.

We nearly forgot about the Reverend in the pleasure of preparing for him. The day of his visit dawned under a small, anxious cloud: we were still ourselves, still living in that dullest of times, the present. The visit could not be what we had hoped.

“Inviting themselves over…” said Ma, as she cracked a definitive egg. “I never heard of such a thing.”

But as she whipped the whites to a froth, as they took on their own billowing life (like thunderheads … Arabian tents … a swan's rear end), she took courage, and by teatime she was a woman I'd never seen before, a Young Wife out of a magazine, in lipstick and cherry-red wool. She seemed taller, straighter, her smile direct and suddenly magnetic, as if her misanthropic agony had only been stage fright, mastered now the curtain was rising. Snapping her earrings off, replacing them, she ran on stockinged feet (the cake would fall if we didn't tiptoe, she said) from the bathroom, where she checked her face in the mirror, to the kitchen, where she checked the cake in the oven, and back.

“Now, Katie,” she said, kneeling—falling to her knees, really, in her narrow skirt—on the carpet before me. “I want you to be very good and grown up and not get in the way.” She plucked at my curls, fluffing them the way she'd plumped the sofa pillows a minute before. It was part of her new persona—she was treating me like a child!

“Of course I'll be good,” I said, with such bitter dignity that she remembered herself and became naturally maternal for a moment, gentle and full of sense.

“You'll be a brilliant conversationalist,” she said, straightening my collar. “Remember, it's just like talking to me. Ask them about things they're interested in, or tell them things that are interesting to you. The way we talk about
Alice in Wonderland.
”

“Off with their heads!” said I. It was her favorite line, ruthlessly repeated and often in the Red Queen's rapid-fire style, but sometimes (when, for instance, my father had angered her) slowly, musingly, and as if there were a guillotine in the next room.

She gave a shout of laughter—we were kindred, confidantes, conspirators again. I was her best friend—her only friend in the world.

The mantel clock chimed its ominous prelude, then the hour: four o'clock. The Reverend Twilling was due to arrive, but we waited five, then ten minutes with no sign.

“Took a wrong turn, I suppose,” Ma said gaily, as if one must expect the occasional guest to be swallowed by the woods. We lived ten miles from church and town, and people tended to turn back halfway because they couldn't believe that the rutted dirt roads, which forked over plank bridges and climbed through brushy forest only to drop toward a beaver swamp peopled by legions of limbless trees, would lead them to anyone's home.

“I suppose we'll have to eat the cake ourselves,” sighed Ma, but we'd forgotten the front door, which none of us ever used. The Reverend Twilling and his wife, having picked their way through the sprung milkweeds along the path, had been ringing the doorbell. It had been disconnected for years.

The Reverend, to my surprise, exhibited neither puritanical severity nor the jovial curate's hearty bonhomie. Small and fair, with wire-rimmed glasses and a neat, pointed beard, he might but for his collar have been a pharmacist or a bank teller. His wife was a hollow-boned bird whose hair, wound tight at the back of her head, seemed heavier than the rest of her. She carried a red-faced, mewling infant in a blue sleepsuit. Three weeks old, she told my mother, who bent over it with a soft “Oh,” as if it had knocked the breath out of her. The baby's mother, through an act of the most vigorous self-discipline, was able to lift her eyes from its face—she smiled and shook my mother's hand. She had brought us a yellow rose, by way of welcome. It was full open, its ruffled petals flushed with pink.

“Thank you,” I said. Ma had prodded me from behind to accept it. “It looks just like a ripe peach.”

I was overwhelmed by my cleverness, though the adults hadn't seemed to hear me. There could be no question that this rose had a peach's glowing soul. I touched Ma's skirt to gain her attention, and she absently patted my head.

“What a lovely secluded spot you've found,” Mrs. Twilling said, peering through the front window, which since it was cut through the thick stone wall admitted only the narrowest shaft of sun.

“The house of Usher!” said Ma with grim glee. My father, when we were house-hunting, had overruled her interest in a sunny cottage closer to town. But once planted, though she never forgave him, she rooted herself as if this were her own native soil. “The house of the seven gables!” she said.